Monthly Archives: July 2017

Legend has it that in 1988, U.S. Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis opened an election rally in front of a huge crowd in a red state with the ringing words: “This joke will appeal to the Latin scholars amongst you…” He went on to lose decisively to George H. W. Bush.

On that note, this joke will appeal to all the Physics teachers (and other aficionados of the dot-and-cross convention).

For the non-physicists amongst you, this is an illustration of the dot-and-cross convention, which allows us to represent 3D objects on a 2D diagram. The dot represents a vector emerging out of the plane of the paper (think of an arrow coming towards you) and the cross represents a vector directed into the plane of the paper (think of an arrow going away from you).

Even for the most enthusiastic and committed of us, Engelmann and Carnine’s Theory of Instruction (1982) is a fabulously intimidating read.

I have written about some of the ideas before, but a recent conversation with a fellow Physics teacher (I’m looking at you, @DeepGhataura) suggested to me that a revisit might be in order.

In a nutshell, we were talking about sets of examples. Engelmann and Carnine argue that learners learn when they construct generalisations or inferences from sets of examples. It is therefore essential that the sets of examples are carefully chosen and sequenced so that learners do not accidentally generate false inferences. A “false inference” in this context is any one that the instructor does not intend to communicate.

Engelmann and Carnine painstakingly constructed a set of logical rules that they hoped would minimise (or, more ambitiously, completely eliminate) the possibility of generating false inferences. These include the sameness principle of juxtaposition and the difference principle of juxtaposition.

However, in 2011 Carnine and Engelmann realised that they had, in a sense, been re-inventing the wheel as the same logical rules had been formulated by philosopher John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843).

They outlined their system using Mill’s terms and language in the book Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools? (2011).

The Method of Difference (The Difference Principle of Juxtaposition)

How can we use examples to communicate a concept to learners so that the possibility of their drawing false inferences is minimised?

The Method of Difference seeks to establish the limits of a given concept A by explicitly considering not-A.

Imagine a learner who did not understand the concept of blue. We would introduce the concept by showing (say) a picture of a blue bird and saying “This is blue.” We would then show a picture of a bird identical in every respect except that it’s colour was (say) green and say “This is not blue.”

So-far-so-blindingly-obvious, you might say. What you might not immediately appreciate is that applying this simple method rules out a large set of possible misconceptions. Without explicitly considering not-A, a learner might, with some justification, conclude that blue meant “has a beak” or “has feathers”. The Method of Difference rules out these false inferences.

Mind your P’s and Q’s

For a beginning reader, the letters p, q, b and d are problematic since they all share the same basic shape. The difference between them is a difference of orientation. Carnine and Engelmann suggest writing the letter ‘p’ on a transparent sheet and rotating and flipping the sheet to explicitly teach the difference between p and not-p.

Could this be used in Physics teaching?

Don’t zig when you ought to zag

Possibly — one recurring problem that I’ve noticed is that some A-level students routinely mix up magnetic and electric fields. They apply Coulomb’s Law when they should be applying F = BIl , and apply Fleming’s Left Hand Rule where it has no business being applied.

It seems reasonable to assume that it is not a lack of knowledge that is holding them back, but rather a misapplication of knowledge that they already possess. In other words, they are drawing the wrong inference from the example sets that have been presented to them.

Could using the Method of Difference at the beginning of the teaching sequence stop learners from drawing false inferences about the nature of electric and magnetic fields?

Queen Mary made the doleful prediction that, after her death, you would find the words ‘Philip’ and ‘Calais’ engraved upon heart. In a similar vein, the historians of futurity might observe that, in the early years of the 21st century, the dread letters “R.I.” were burned indelibly on the hearts of many of the teachers of Britain.

In a characteristically iconoclastic post, blogger Requires Improvement ruminates on those very same words that he adopted as his nom de guerre: R.I. or “requires improvement”.

He argues convincingly that the Requirement to Improve was, in reality, nothing more than than a Requirement to Conform: the best way to teach had been jolly well sorted out by your elders* and betters and arranged in a comprehensive and canonical checklist. And woe betide you if any single item on this lexicon of pedagogical virtue was left unchecked during a lesson observation!

[*Or “youngers”, in many cases.]

But what were we being asked to confirm to? Requires Improvement writes:

It was (and to an extent, still is) a strange mixture of pedagogies which probably didn’t really please anyone.

It wasn’t (and isn’t) prog; if a lesson has a clear (and teacher-defined) success criterion, it can’t really be progressive. Comparing my experience as a pupil in the 1980’s with that of the pupils I teach now, they are much better trained in what to write to pass exams, and their whole school experience is much more closely managed than mine was.

Equally, it wasn’t (and isn’t) trad; if the lesson model is about pupil talk, or putting generic skills above learning a canon of content, it can’t really be traditional teaching.

I think that Requires Improvement has hit the nail squarely on the head here. What we were being asked (and in many schools, are still are being asked) to do is teach a weird hybrid Frankenstein’s monster of a pedagogy that combines seemingly random elements of both PRogressive and trADitional pedagogies: PRAD, if you will.

As C. P. Scott said of the word television that no good could come of a word that’s half Latin and half Greek, I feel that no good has come of the PRAD experiment.

While many proponents of PRAD counted themselves kings of infinite pedagogic space, congratulating themselves on combining the best of progressive and traditionalist ideologies, the resulting unhappy chimera in actuality reflected the poverty of mainstream educational thought.

But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.

— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Rather than a magical wingèd lion that breathes fire, PRAD is a stubby-winged mishmash that can’t fly, can’t lay golden eggs, and that spends its miserable days hacking up furballs. It is time to put it out of its misery.